Page 8 - Life of Christ - textbook (3)

Study Section 2: Important Foundational Information

2.1 Connect.

If you play a game, say football (soccer in US), you need to know the rules of the game before
you play, or you will really mess up. You might even kick the ball in the wrong goal! You need to
know that you can’t touch the ball with your hands or arms so you can’t catch it. You can only
hit it with your head, body, or feet. And there are many more rules you need to know to play
the game. The same is true about reading the Bible. If you don’t know some of the rules and
key players in the story, you won’t fully understand what is going on or why something happened. So
today, we are going to start learning foundation information about the life and time of Christ, who the
main characters are, and some prominent locations. Then we can start moving into the four Gospels.
Ready?

2.2 Objectives.

1. The student should be able to discuss key people, especially religious people who were
prominent in many of the Gospel stories.

2. The student should be able to describe the Sanhedrin or ruling body in Israel during the
Roman occupation at the time of Christ.

3. The student should be able to explore the sites of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to determine
their significance in Jesus’ life.

2.3 Important Foundational Information for a Survey of the Gospels

To fully understand the culture during the time of Christ, it is important that we know a little
about several Jewish developments in this period of history.

Diaspora or “Dispersion”
The Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria in 722 BCE and many of the Jews
were carried off into the Assyrian Empire north and east of Palestine. A second dispersion took
place in 522 BCE as Babylon conquered Jerusalem and carried off Jewish captives to Persia. The vast
majority of Jews acclimated to their new surroundings and never returned to Palestine. So in the first
century, most Jews were found throughout the Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia, however a
minority of Jews lived under Roman rule in Palestine.
2

Samaritans
When the Northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh were conquered by Assyria in 722 BCE, many were
slaughtered, but many were carried off as slaves to be assimilated into the Empire. At the same time,
the king of Assyria sent Assyrian people from Cutha, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim to inhabit Samaria.
They intermarried with the Israelite population that was still in and around Samaria. As a result, they
created an entire race of mixed children. These people did not worship as the Jews in Judea but had

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora

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